Given the recent performance changes following the Spectre/Meltdown CPU vulnerability mitigation and having just wrapped up some fresh CPU bare metal benchmarks as part of that testing as well as the recent AMD Raven Ridge launch, I've carried out a fresh round this week of benchmarks on various Amazon EC2 on-demand instance types compared to a number of bare metal Intel and AMD processors in looking at how the compute performance compares.

Roderick Colenbrander's Wine-Vulkan work for Vulkan infrastructure support under Wine has been updated and is ready for review, making these initial bits a candidate for soon being incorporated into mainline Wine.

Roderick has spent the past few months on the Vulkan infrastructure for Wine as a Vulkan layer with ICD driver support rather than the older Vulkan library (non-ICD implementation) found in Wine-Staging.

While waiting to see what Khronos could have in store for GDC 2018 next month around Vulkan, today marks the Vulkan 1.0.69 point release availability.

With Vulkan 1.0.68 having shipped in the middle of January, there are a fair amount of documentation improvements/fixes over the past month. As usual, addressing issues with the documentation reflects a majority of the changes for these point releases. Of the issues addressed in Vulkan 1.0.69, it's mostly a collection of over a dozen minor problems.

Earlier this month Valve Linux GPU driver developer Timothy Arceri landed NIR shader caching support within the Gallium3D Mesa state tracker as an alternative to the existing TGSI IR caching support. Arceri has now worked through implementing this NIR cache support for the RadeonSI driver.

JBoss Data Virtualization is a data integration solution that sits in front of multiple data sources and allows them to be treated as a single source, delivering the right data, in the required form, at the right time to any application and/or user.

On December 8, 2017, the ambassadors in Mexico City, Efren Robledo (srkraken) and Alberto Rodríguez (bt0dotninja) hosted a Fedora 27 Release Party. The party took place on the UAM Azcapotzalco in the basic sciences and engineering division. We had three main activities: Introducing Fedora 27 talk , Q&A session and a little trivia session with some gifts.

As 2018 is in full session now, people, companies and organizations are taking stock not only of what’s worked during the past year, but of budding trends and approaches to handling daily business. We also can let this chance pass by knowing that it could help us in our undertakings this year.

Why Do We Let Unqualified Rich People Tell Us How To Live? Especially Bill Gates!

In 1975, at the age of 20, Bill Gates founded Microsoft with high school buddy Paul Allen. At the time Gary Kildall’s CP/M operating system was the industry standard. Even Gates’ company used it. But Kildall was an innovator, not a businessman, and when IBM came calling for an OS for the new IBM PC, his delays drove the big mainframe company to Gates. Even though the newly established Microsoft company couldn’t fill IBM’s needs, Gates and Allen saw an opportunity, and so they hurriedly bought the rights to another local company’s OS — which was based on Kildall’s CP/M system. Kildall wanted to sue, but intellectual property [sic] law for software had not yet been established. Kildall was a maker who got taken.

So Bill Gates took from others to become the richest man in the world. And now, because of his great wealth and the meritocracy myth, MANY PEOPLE LOOK TO HIM FOR SOLUTIONS IN VITAL AREAS OF HUMAN NEED, such as education and global food production.

Free is a good price, so the saying goes, so free, open source real time operating systems (RTOSs) might seem like a good deal. But they’re typically not worth the risks for developers of embedded and IoT devices such as home automation and wearable devices, medical instruments, and industrial control systems. Before you decide, make sure you understand the real costs and pitfalls of using an open source—rather than commercial—RTOS.

Always on the lookout for more interesting Linux games, I recently came across the AI-driven robot fighting game Gladiabots [itch.io].

It's quite a strange experience, but also quite fun. You don't have direct control over any of your units, instead you set them a bunch of behaviours and then what each match play-out and see where you need to tweak your AI to eventually be the winner.

Not getting enough space-combat sims? Hypergate [Steam] is a pretty good-looking one that's confirmed for Linux and due out in December this year.

The developer recently tweeted out to announce the game and the release, along with a firm mention of Linux support. As a huge fan of space-combat flight sims, I'm pretty darn excited to give this one a go.

Feral Interactive announced today that their port of A Total War Saga: Thrones Of Britannia will be released for macOS and Linux shortly after the Windows release on April 19th. Originally developed by Creative Assembly and published by SEGA for Windows, Thrones Of Britannia is the first in the new Total War Saga series of standalone games inspired by great turning points of history. That we’ll be getting the mac and linux port of the game shortly after the original windows release is pretty darn cool, as we normally have to wait quite a while to see them.

Qt 5.11 Alpha is released today. As usual the official Alpha is a source code delivery only, but later we will offer development snapshots of Qt 5.11 regularly via the online installer.

Please check Qt 5.11 New Features wiki to see what new is coming with Qt 5.11 release. Please note that the feature list is still in progress and not to be considered final before the first Beta release.

With a decent 18:9 screen, the P Smart is a fine Android phone that should appeal to anyone looking for a cheap contract phone. However, the fact it’s so similar to the Honor 9 Lite (which costs £100 less when bought SIM-free) makes it hard to recommend, especially as the Honor has a couple of extra features – dual SIM and a second front camera – which the Huawei lacks.

Linux hosting is everywhere. Whether you're looking for a simple shared hosting account or a powerful dedicated server, the chances are that you'll be offered a Linux-based option first.

In many cases, you might not care. If your hosting needs are simple, you'll probably choose an account based on the allocated web space, bandwidth and similar features – the operating system is so far down most people's priority list that often it's not even mentioned in comparison tables.

Last year, a vigilante hacker [sic] broke into the servers of a company that sells spyware to everyday consumers and wiped their servers, deleting photos captured from monitored devices. A year later, the hacker [sic] has done it again.

Australia's data breach notification law takes effect this Thursday and new resources for the public have been released by the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner before the law comes into force.

KaOS 2017.11 feels like a very buggy product. While I do like the Nvidia setup right from the start, this little gem is offset by pretty much everything else. Most other recent distros rarely had any issues with the LG RD510 laptop - apart from the ATA link reset on wake after suspend, which affects all of them - but KaOS is an exception to that rule with a rather depressing hardware record - Bluetooth, Wireless no-reconnect, smartphone support. And let's not even talk about Samba.

The responsiveness was quite bad, Kaptan did not work, and I wasn't enjoying the visual side of things one bit. In fact, I really do not understand the eye-killing choices that go with the default theme. All in all, there are very few redeeming factors to KaOS. If you're looking for something avant-garde, the Arch-based Antergos or Manjaro fit the bill rather well. If you want mainstream, Mint or Ubuntu or whatever. This falls somewhere in between, with nothing amazing in return. 2/10. Perhaps next time.

With my launch testing of the Raven Ridge desktop APUs with the Ryzen 5 2400G and Ryzen 3 2200G there were some stability issues to report and some hangs within games and mode-setting issues. It appears those issues are exacerbated with some motherboards: the past few days with two different AMD B350 motherboards have been a real pain getting the current AMDGPU driver stack working -- and even Linux 4.17 AMDGPU WIP code -- on either of these Raven Ridge APUs.

With GPU prices increasing exponentially over the past few months, it’s been hard to price out a PC. This particular build took us nearly a year to assemble; getting all the parts together was a challenge. (TK, our video producer, delivered the last piece of the puzzle after the Consumer Electronics Show in January.)

Our goal was to show what a decent budget can get you in an all-AMD build, and what kind of performance you can expect from it. Thanks to AMD Ryzen and Polaris, we were able to do just that.

One of the discussion items in the forums this week was about the video memory allowance for the Vega graphics on Raven Ridge APUs as well as efficiences or inefficiencies around the TTM memory manager as used by the AMDGPU kernel driver. Here are some vRAM size tests with the Ryzen 3 2200G.

​Welcome to the second part of the web server setup series. In this part, I'll show you how to fix CWP (CentOS web panel) errors and warnings, create new user accounts, create hosting packages, and create FTP account. So let's start.

​Linux and UNIX systems come with a shell command known as ‘grep’. This simply looks for a specified text, or pattern, in a file or an entire directory. The most common usage is for quickly searching a file for occurrences of a pattern, which can be in plain text, or in the form of a regular expression. Here, the patterns used will be simple text rather than regular expressions.

More in Tux Machines

Why open source could be IBM's key to future success in the cloud

Do those same developers need IBM? Developers certainly benefit from IBM's investments in open source, but it's not as clear that those same developers have much to gain from IBM's cloud. Google, for example, has done a stellar job open sourcing code like TensorFlow and Kubernetes that feeds naturally into running related workloads on Google Cloud Platform. Aside from touting its Java bonafides, however, IBM has yet to demonstrate that developers get significant benefits for modern workloads on its cloud.
That's IBM's big challenge: Translating its open source expertise into real, differentiated value for developers on its cloud.

Top 8 Debian-Based Distros

Most people tend to forget that despite Ubuntu's success over the years, it's still just a distro based on another distro - Debian. Debian on its own, however, isn't really well suited for newer users...hence the explosion of distros based on Debian over the recent years. There are lot of great choices for Linux users. Which one is best for you?

Compact, rugged IoT gateway offers dual GbE with PoE

Inforce has launched a $250 “Inforce 6320” IoT gateway that runs Linux on a quad -A53 Snapdragon 410, and offers WiFi, BT, GPS, HDMI, USB, -30 to 85°C support, and dual GbE ports with PoE.
Inforce Computing’s $250 Inforce 6320 is a compact (170 x 95 x 42mm) IoT gateway that runs Ubuntu Core (Snappy) and Debian on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 410E. Inforce promises “periodic upstream kernel based BSP releases [that] include in-depth documentation along with a host of royalty-free software.” The Debian BSP includes LXDE, drivers for all available interfaces, as and access to the Inforce TechWeb tech support services.